There’s a virus out there that will rear its ugly head on Friday. It’s known by various names including ‘Nyxem’ and ‘Blackmal’ and could delete Office and Acrobat documents from your computer.
There’s a virus out there that will rear its ugly head on Friday. It’s known by various names including ‘Nyxem’ and ‘Blackmal’ and could delete Office and Acrobat documents from your computer.
On the third of each month, starting this Friday it will destroy Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Acrobat files plus Access databases among others.
If you’ve followed our long standing suggestions for protection against emailed nasties you should be OK – but since this one could be lurking it’s worth a double check – hence this short warning to our readers.
If you have anti-virus software (and if you don’t, why not?) then make sure it is up to date then run a full scan over your computers.
Your AV software should have detected any nasties when they first arrived, but some can slip through so regular full scans are a wise move. Running a full AV scan before ‘special’ events like this is probably more for peace of mind than necessity.
For the same reason, you might want to do a backup of your documents.
The original virus might have arrived as an email message with one of the following subject lines:
- Funny 🙂
- My photos
- Crazy illegal sex
- Real show
- Miss Lebanon 2006
- Give me a kiss
- School girl fantasies gone bad
Once running on a computer it can infect other computers on the network so even computers that don’t have normal email access could be infected.
All the gory details of the virus are on Symantec’s site and there’s also a removal tool if you’re already infected.
Several of the anti-virus makers have downloadable demos for you to try. We’ve been trying out F-Prot lately.
